The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (4 page)

The initial internal organization of CAP owes a great deal to Amina's insight and hard work. Certainly any growth and development of the women's division is her work. The African Free School, which at one time was our crowning achievement, was brought about largely through her efforts, organizational and theoretical. The insidious characterization of her as some silent, male-dominated anonymity has continuously outraged her, and her political declaration of independence was obviously meant to fly publicly into the face of that lie. And she has constantly accused me of collaborating with this characterization and characterizers, which include my first wife and the children we had, and through her influence, my family as a whole, which she feels has never been reconciled to our marriage. That is, she thinks they have tried to split us up because they didn't dig me being married to a working-class woman.

All of this, as far as I'm concerned, is untrue or at most overstated and distorted. But our enemies go to great lengths to make these absurdities seem palpable. For instance, Amina feels that her own background as dancer, painter and sculptor, actress, political activist, and cultural organizer are hidden not only by the hostile system, but with even greater injury, by me as well. Again, I am collaborating with our enemies to attack, belittle, and falsely characterize her. One reason for this, as a certain assembled opinion will confirm, is my historical alienation from Black women.

This is a strange introduction to the reprinting of this book. I am still not ready to write the autobiography past the years circa 1974–75 where this book leaves off. I have no doubt I will. These comments, I suppose, are an attempt to sum up partially where my mind, as least, is now and why it is there.

Amina and I are still married and chances are we will be for the rest of our lives. Why? Because we love each other. Despite the sharpness and continuity of our struggles, nothing but love could have held us together under the force of such opposition, though I do not, and nor does she, I think, claim invincibility, either in our public or personal lives. But we do claim the emotional, psychological, and intellectual strength to withstand our enemies' designs and learn to live with our own contradictions as a visible confirmation that with all them disagreements, it must be love, like the song says.

—AB 1996

Stages here are Steps and attempts at evaluation (essays, assays). These are summings up, if only partially, of various steps, processes, beginnings, middles, endings in my life. These stages are also places whereupon acts occur and also those acts themselves, as part of one overall act, really
process
my life. And so these stages are like essays trying to help us understand and illuminate a portion of the American experience.

Within that American experience is the history and life of the African American Nation; a piece of the whole, yet
unintegrated
into that whole, black noncitizens whose only forward direction must be toward Self-Determination!

For me, being here has always been a condition of struggle and, hopefully, growth. These could be called
Essays on the Stages of My Life
. To essay is also to attempt! So these are attempts to sum up that life, before having lived it all. Attempts to “make sense” where it has been difficult to see any sense.

Step
of a life
turns
under the sun
& the sun
turns &
burns &
finally one last day
goes
out
Its history
is a tail
Tales for
remembering
words for
understanding
A long way (opens)
Back then &
there
we see now
again
To know
Seeing
& understand
Our
Being
.

Why these “Memoirs”? Because it seems my life plagues a few people. They want to “know” how I got wherever they perceive I am. Why I would leave where they “thought” I was in the first place. But was I ever there, where they thunk? And where was they?

But it is, has been, a path. From the beginning. And these “findings” are meant as darkness-altering mechanisms, small lights for seeing what a person will do and maybe why.

But even so (just to put a little doo doo in the contest), who knows if this is the real stuff, the
lowdown
. Perhaps I'm distorting for my own reasons, hiding various things. Who can say? The lies officials will put out about me (even the unofficial officials) will be bad enough to make these memoirs of mine at least a relief. At least that's what I say.

—AB 1981

Growing up was a maze of light and darkness to me. I never fully understood the purpose of childhood. Baby pictures nonplussed me. It looks like me a little, I thought. But what the hell, I didn't know nuthin'. It ain't that cute. Falling back like that, toothless grimace, mouth bare, legs bent, fat with diapers. And them probably wet.

Growing has obsessed me, maybe because I reached a certain point and stopped. My feeling is that I was always short. Maybe that's why people like those baby pictures, because you couldn't tell I was short then. Later, it became obvious and people started to rub it in.

I was not only short, little, a runt. But skinny too. Short and skinny. But as a laughing contrast I got these big bulbous eyes. Big eyes. And it was no secret where they came from: my old man. Actually, you could say I got my whole “built” from him (Coyette Leroy Jones). But I don't want to slander him, because he is my father and I love him.

But people always would be sliding up to me saying, “You look just like your father,” or to him, “Roy, he look just like you,” or to my mother or some other hopeless “responsible” in whose charge I was placed, “Hey, he look just like Roy” — “He look just like his father.” It made you wonder (even then) why they put so much insistence on this. Was this a miracle?
Wasn't I spose' to look like him? What was this wonder at creation? (Later, I would make up other implications of this charge.)

And today people take my second son, Ras, through the same bizness. And to a lesser extent his three brothers and sister. But this was a stamp or some stamps of Young: that I was short and skinny with big eyes and looked just like my father. These were the most indelible. My earliest identity.

I knew, too, rather early, that I was brown. Brown with a round face and sometimes wavy hair. These were later dissociations. Brown, round, and wavy. OK.

I thought I looked OK. Sometimes better than other times. When I had on what I wanted and wasn't too sparkly from my brown mom's Vaseline aspirations, I didn't look bad. Shit, I was just short! That's all. (Even the “skinny” shit was a secondary harassment.)

Another thing is that we were always in motion. It seemed that way. But why or how or even the supposed chaos of such a situation never registered. It certainly was never explained to me by anyone. Though I guess you could get some word from these Johnny-come-lately sociologists, if you got the time to be bored with their chauvinism. But it was our way, is what etched itself somewhere.

From Barclay Street, a “luxury” project we had to move out of, $24 a month was too much even though my ol' man had just got a good job at the Post Office. But he couldn't cut those prices, so we had to space. But I have some early memories of that place. Its park, its fire escapes (I nearly fell off and ended the saga right here), its red bricks and some light browns and yellows flittin' round.

Earlier than this is a blank, though I have “memories” produced by later conversations. Like being hit by a car — banged in the head (or do I remember the steel grille smacking my face, trying to wake me up!?).

A dude hit me in the head with a big rock. And I still carry the scar. I think I remember that sharp pain. A cold blue day. A brown corduroy jacket. And the whiz of wind as I broke round the corner to our crib.

I pulled a big brown radio down, also on my head. (Ah, these multiple head injuries — is something beginning to occur to you? Spit it out!) Another scar, still there. The radio had a knob missing and the metal rod sunk into my skull just left of my eye.

Tolchinskie's Pickle Works across the street. A smell and taste so wonderful I been hooked ever since (every sense). Hey, man, in a wooden barrel, with them big green pimples on 'em. And good shit floatin' around in the barrel with 'em.

A guy who flashed around and tried to teach us to play tennis. That's how “horizontal” our community was then. Almost all of us right there, flattened out by the big NO. Later, more would “escape,” rise up a trifle by our collective push. PUSHy niggers. That's later a verticality rises, so we know. The vicissitudes of NO.

But I never learned how to play tennis. That yellowness never got in. But it was different in my house than out in the street. Different conventions. Like gatherings — of folks and their histories. Different accumulations of life. So those references and their
enforcement
.

You see, I come from brown niggers from way back. Yeh. But some yellow niggers — let's say color notwithstanding — some yellow and even some factual,
a
factual, white motherfucker or fatherfucker in there.

I was secure in most ways. My father and mother I knew and related to every which way I can remember. They were the definers of my world. My guides. My standards. (So any “nut-outs” y'all claim got to begin there!)

I was a little brown boy on my mother's hand. A little brown big-eyed boy with my father. With a blue watch cap with Nordic design. At the World's Fair (1939) eyes stretched trying to soak up the days and their lessons.

But the motion was constant. And that is a standard as well. From Barclay to Boston (Street) and the halfdark of my grandmother's oil lamp across the street. They had me stretched out one night, buddeeee, and this redfreckle-face nigger was pickin' glass outta my knee. There were shadows everywhere. And mystery.

My grandfather had had a grocery store on that same street earlier, but that was washed away in the '30s with a bunch of other stuff. My grandfather didn't shoot himself, or jump off a building. But after that, we was brown for sure!

And so for that branch of the family, there was a steep descent. My mother's folks, the Russes. In Alabama the old man owned two grocery stores and a funeral parlor. First grocery stores burned down by “jealous crackers” (my grandmother's explanation). After the second arson, they had to hat. First, to Pennsylvania (Beaver Falls) and then finally to Newark.

My father was running from dee white folkz too. He had bopped some dude side the head in a movie he ushered in. The dude was an ofay. (Naturlich!) And so, again, the hat was called for.

To arrive, out of breath, in a place you thought was The Apple but turned out to be the
prune
(Newark) or the raisin. Jobless, detached from the
yellow streak of the Jones's (nee Johns's) upward mobility, even there inside the brown. A part-time barber, for mostly white folks, with a high school diploma — though three of his sisters were bound for college. Projected from a teeny brown white-haired widow lady, daughter of another teeny brown white-haired widow lady, who shot the distaffs through on sewing for white folks and a blissful irony that smiled the bittersweet recognition of the place and its inhabitants. Its mores and morons.

So that's where we was coming from. The church of specific reality. Inside the general (flight) our Johns-Jones/Russ lives merging. But see, they had sent my mother to Tuskegee (when it was a high school) and then to Fisk. I used to look at both yearbooks full of brown and yellow folks. She had one flick poised at the starting line, butt up, large eyes catching the whole world, about to take off. Her name then was “Woco-Pep,” a Southern gasoline. She was that fast.

Where she was going to in her parents' heads, I ain't exactly hip. Except it's safe to say it was
up
. Storekeeper father, mother and brother assistants in the joint, and whatnot. But somehow she ran into this big-eyed skinny dude. (MF) My father. A tipsy part-time barber or a barber who occasionally got deep in his cups. The story goes he flipped his little Ford on top of his drunk self on 13th Avenue and come out from under swearing off.

You see an irony here? No? A split-off from the upwardly mobile somehow molests (with permission) the scioness of the nigger rich. Except by 1929 all them fireworks was put out by Ugly Sissy's fatal flaw — capitalismus. And so the new day dawned with a pregnant coed who did not get to go to the Olympics and a new member of the family who didn't come from “bad stock” (!aagh hopeless!) but what the hell was his thoroughly brown ass going to do now?

Marrying your mama, Jim. What else? And so flow the streams together. (But wasn't one of the first Negroes to read in South Carolina, complete with plaque and multiple modest legend, your old man's Uncle Enoch? Yaas — that's affirmative — over. And them slender and fat sisters of his, wasn't they all got to be teachers and shit? Affirmative — J.A.M.F. So couldink you say they was all in the same shit — anyway?)

You see, you doesink understand colored people or color peepas either. My mother's folks was in business. Them funeral parlor dudes was and is the actual colored rich guys. The bourgeoisie, dig? Them teachers and shit (his old man [MF's] was a preacher part-time and chef, also bricklayed a taste. Got the flu and it took him off), they just the petty bourgeoisie. And
hell, they even had food smells and brick dust on 'em and some sew-for-white-ladies thread on 'em. Whew!

Later, it really cracked up. They was drug down! That's what the scuttlebutt was. Arguments in our weird orange house years later. My uncle called my father a “nincompoop.” What is that? Because these Russes had been drug down, Jim! Outta they funeral parlors, outta they stores, Granddaddy to be a night watchman, his wife on the bus to Essex Fells to curl up some white ladies' hairs, and wouldn't ya know it, MF “had” MM in a dusty-ass Jew factory doing piecework. (But he did make a breakthrough, you got to admit. He wasn't jes' a dum' nigger. He did get in the Post Office!) Thass rumblings all up in there as part of the collective psyche. On the X spot of the altar. The forebodings and nigger history. All stuffed into me gourd unrapped on arrival. But ye gets used to hearing tumblings in the wind and words the leaves make spinning in the air like that.